


The People Up at 3 A.m.

by PepperCat



Series: The Secret History of Hartley Rathaway [5]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: 3 a.m., Angst, Character Study, Diners, Gen, Getting Fired, Self-Doubt, canon-compatible, nothing looks good at 3 a.m., plot-light
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-22
Updated: 2017-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-21 05:23:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,685
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12450498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PepperCat/pseuds/PepperCat
Summary: Someone else's perspective on dealing with a stressed-out, overtired genius who can't seem to hold a job to save his life.





	The People Up at 3 A.m.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve mentioned Hartley’s favourite diner before in a few of my fics, but I hadn’t written up his first encounter with it. This is something that’s been in my drafts since at least July. (July _**2016**_ , to be clear. Yeesh.)
> 
> Set in S1 after "[I Came Here For You](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6358723)" and "[Though you try to drown him I can hear him singing.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7517617)" which explains the awful state of Hartley's hands; he's managed to both bruise them purple by turning his gloves up too loud and then gotten bitten by a rat.
> 
> The dialogue in French will appear in English if you hover your mouse over it; there's also a translation in the notes at the end.

The diner had a month left, Marisse knew. Maybe two. The owner was young and attached to the place in a way Marisse both understood and thought was foolish, and maybe with a clean slate it could have worked out, but there was too much old weight on the books, debts that never quite got paid off, only paid down, and more coming in each month. The coffee machine had gotten finicky and runs hot enough to worry Marisse sometimes. The bottom half of the door had been replaced with painted plywood since someone kicked it in over New Year's and they couldn't swing a new one yet. The benches in the booths were growing duct-tape scars. Marisse was sure Cuive traded a favour to have the last order of meat fall off the back of a truck in a nicer part of Keystone.

It was sinking.

She wasn't sure if Cuive was keeping the place open at night out of stubbornness or pity. Either way, it meant Marisse could spend the nights--cold, rainy, still winter-bitten--in a near-empty diner rather than huddling in what passes for home trying to figure out how to get the heat turned back on.

There was a scatter of customers at the start of her shift, but it emptied out by midnight, and Marisse settled behind the counter with her book.

The man--little more than a kid, really--came in when the clock was trembling towards ten to three, looking ragged and white. There were dark circles under his eyes behind his glasses. He was dressed in clean clothes, all black, thin jacket streaked with rain.

He looked around like he hadn't checked what the place was before he came in, just headed for the nearest light, and now wasn't too impressed by what he was seeing. Marisse didn't blame him. The place was nicer when she started working here, but that was most of his lifetime ago.

But he raised his eyebrows to her politely and went to take a seat when she nodded towards the empty room, folded his hands on the table and waited for her to come over.

"Coffee," he said when she did, and blinked and seemed to remember himself. "Please." Nothing personal, just manners. His hands were bruised purple and green and there was a bandage on one of them. Marisse would have guessed wrong side of a loan shark, if she had to, but it was odd nothing was broken. Either way, he looked haggard as hell.

Crazy mean how the bad moments in life didn't wait until you had a full stomach and a good night's sleep before showing up.

"Sure, hon. I'll put a fresh pot on; it'll be a few minutes. You want a menu?"

"No, thank you." He'd looked up at first, but now he was staring at his hands. Polite, at least.

She poured out the old coffee and rinsed the pot, then set a new one brewing. She had to unplug and plug the coffee machine three times before it clicked on and started hissing. Wished he was ordering something--you got a tip on coffee sometimes, but it was never worth counting on and never much--but having someone else in the place made it seem a little less blank. An hour empty at night and the place started to feel like an old television screen tuned to a blank channel, all fuzzy and wriggling.

It was the blue, she thought. The walls were a dingy shade of blue, like souring toothpaste. She remembered it being nice when it was fresh, but now it just seemed to seep grease and showed up every smear.

She brought him coffee and a glass of water, asked if he wanted cream or milk ("No, thank you"), and went back to leaning on the counter. She'd brought one of her romance novels; it wasn't her favourite, but she hadn't read it in a while, so that was okay. And every four pages or so, she glanced up, and at the end of the chapter (that she'd been partway through anyway), she came by again with the coffee. The cup was still a third full.

"You need a warm-up, hon?"

He looked up at her and hesitated. Most people didn't need to think about the answer to that. Even when they said yes and then ended up leaving it in their cup, they said yes faster than he did.

"I won't charge you for it," she prompted.

"No, that's not--" He gave a thin little laugh. "It's fine." Which was one of those nonsense answers, not useful, but when she held out the coffee again he pushed the cup towards her. "How long have you been here?"

"I've been here fourteen years, hon. If you mean the diner, I don't know."

"D'you like it?"

Oh, one of those--a three a.m. talker. Well, she'd already read her book once, and he wasn't drunk or mean or reeking, so she'd dealt with worse. "It's nice seeing people," she said. She wasn't sure he was actually listening, but he nodded.

"I can't get the work I l--liked," he said. "Not anymore." Marisse made an _uhm-hmm_ ing noise and leaned against the edge of the booth. "I was fired from my last job, and-- I was good at it. I was _very_ good." She heard a familiar arrogance in his voice, underneath the exhaustion. Not that he was good--he might be or not, she wouldn't know--but that he needed someone to know it, and with no-one else around that someone could be a tired old waitress with no heat in her apartment. "And I was fired."

"Hard luck." Not too hard, she guessed, but bad enough if it was what had him in here looking so worn out. "You been looking long?"

He blinked at her and put his hands around the coffee cup--carefully, because of all the bruising. "I did for a while," he said. "He-- my old boss made it very difficult to find anything. _Il est dangereux d’avoir raison dans des choses où des hommes accrédités ont tort._ "

" _C'est toujours le cas,_ " she answered, and he blinked and then gave a little nod, like he was making a note of something.

" _Je n'ai jamais été renvoyé, auparavent,_ " he said, and then added with a bitter grin, " _Pas de mon travail._ " He switched back to English. "Being let go's a peculiarly apt term for it. It's like-- am I boring you?"

" _Non_ , hon. You go ahead. "

"It's like the ground wasn't under your feet, but you didn't know it," he said. "You're not keeping yourself up. Someone else is keeping you up. And then they just..." he gestured as if he was scattering dust from his fingertips, "let go."

"It's hard." It wasn't really a conversation, Marisse knew, just a sympathy noise. But he didn't seem to need much more right now, just nodded and went on.

"And I found someone I thought I'd like to work with. There's something..." He cupped his hands carefully around the coffee, lifted it and sipped. "He seems to know what he's doing. And I'm not sure he'd _need_  me to work with him, not for long, but I thought..." He took a deep breath and started speaking faster. "Maybe for a little. Just a night's work. But the help he wanted, I couldn't, I thought I could do it but I screwed up. I _really_  screwed up. I couldn't _imagine_  screwing up that badly." He made a little hiccupping noise and when he put the coffee down again it trembled against the table. "I don't know if I'd have wanted to work with him again, but God, did I fuck it up."

Marisse could think of at least two different things he might have been talking about and neither really explain the odd bruising, but her feet were getting sore and she didn't feel like prying. "Maybe it's not as bad as you think, hon."

He looked up at her, lip curled. "Thank you _so much_ for your informed perspective," he said. "Why on earth should I discount my experience in favour of yours?"

"Well," Marisse said, because maybe it was the job worries and she _understood_ that or maybe it was just that he still looked young and possibly stupid enough to work himself up over close to nothing, no matter how good he'd been at whatever he did, and she was suddenly a little tired to let it pass, "you're in here drinking coffee at three in the morning with bags under your eyes so bad you look like you put your eyeshadow on the wrong way 'round." The sneer dropped off his face and he blinked. "Your perspective's probably a little off too."

"I hardly think--"

"I'm sure you think fine, most times. Just." She circled her free hand in the air at him and raised an eyebrow.

He snorted and looked away, but his shoulders dropped a little from that wire-hanger-stiff posture they'd held. "Thank you for listening," he said, quiet again, and Marisse figured he was probably ashamed and that if she was getting stiffed it was only on the cost of a cup of coffee she hadn't rung up yet so she wouldn't need to make it up, and moved away.

She went back to the counter and kept reading. In a little, out of the corner of her eye, she saw him get up and cross to the door.

"Nice seeing you," she called out, and the bell on the door tinked mournfully as it shut behind him.

She finished her page and went by his table to clear it, and saw that he'd not only paid, he'd left a pair of twenties on the table--set slightly to the side of the pair of ones, as if to make it clear he hadn't miscounted.

Not enough to really turn anything around, but Marisse figured it was a better rate than she'd ever gotten for listening to someone talk before.

**Author's Note:**

> A little voluble for Hartley, but 3 a.m. can make that happen.
> 
> The dialogue translates as follows:  
> "It's dangerous to be right about things the authorities are wrong about." (a Voltaire quote)  
> "That's always the case."  
> "I was never fired, before." (literally, _never sent back_ ) "Not from my job."


End file.
